Saturday, September 10, 2022

Rewilding

 





I have been reading and thinking a lot about rewilding this past month, inspired by first a book called Wilding, and now even more so a book I am just finishing (and sad it is so!) called Feral. I would briefly describe this rewilding movement (process) as one in which environments are let to go their own way, but with an eye towards their richest possible ecology, their origins as a wild land, and the world they actually exist in now. So a light hand of the human and a trust in the wisdom of nature.

I may be talking about this more in days to come.

I even have started on a new round of pictures and have recently been spending some time in an odd environment; a massive new building project in Saint Minneapolis where an enormous car factory used to be and is now part of one of the city's largest ever developments. It is near the river and is being converted into something like a new neighborhood, almost, with apartments, parks, and an uncertain amount of commerce. For now, it is a fascinating, half-finished land with completed new buildings, unfinished buildings, artificial streams and paths and ponds, slag heaps, a city of construction workers, and inadvertent geese ponds in slashed fields of rubble and piled construction materials.

I'm still working out what so appeals to and interests me about this environment: The possibility of a new kind of city in my city? The strange, inadvertent wilds that emerge in a torn-up landscape? Or maybe even the sheer thrill of finally gaining entry to a land long dead and unavailable to me even though I passed it a thousand times? I don't just love the geese ponds that will surely be snuffed out as the development commences, but I love the new, carved out stone and artificial stream, both real as an exposed stream long buried, and manufactured as a contained pathway and park, creating a kind of environment that's stony and canyony like nothing else in this region of the country. But perhaps most of all I am interested right now by the fringe landscapes that are here.

It's almost like they've made these little artificial wild places, and I am enchanted by them, and enjoy them, but they don't seem to have much life to them, and yet beyond them, where they meet a raw, carved up wasted land, there's oddly all this stuff happening, geese and strange bees and masses of frogs and rough hedges of raw wildflowers. I don't know what to make of it, and am curious to see what happens.





1 comment:

  1. Maybe those who are doing that huge project will do at least some of it in ways that help the environment and climate as well as their pockets. I hope you will keep your faithful readers up to date on progress.

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